The issue of `deep states’ had drawn the attention of at least some mainstream journalists for an instant or so around February of 2014 because of a very interesting article by Mike Lofgren, a former Senate staffer; I’ll get to that article in a short while. The attention seems to have been a flash in the pan though, if deep states truly exist and if the United States has become one, it’s arguably the most important of public issues, politics and economics and even culture to a surprising extent. A deep state is a thoroughly corrupt state sure to be dangerously exploitive of its own citizenry and, if that deep state is a superpower, of many in other lands.
Since I tend to be interested in the true nature of human beings, individual and communal and in the story God is telling—the story which is this world, I don’t always respond to journalistic fads in the way of the shallow journalists or the bulk of blog commentators. Thus it is that a still inadequate stewing time of a few months has returned me to a subject of great importance in the modern world—criminal conspiracies carried out by members or servants of the power-elites, which criminal conspiracies are made possible by standing-gangs within governments or in close alliance with governments. It’s not the spectacular crimes, as such, which interest me but rather the importance of the types of men who engage in criminal conspiracies when they are holding positions of public responsibility or are part of the general power-elite; those servants, often feudalistic in their personal loyalty, are also willing to put that loyalty above any duties to God or country or their personal families. (E Howard Hunt, CIA operative deeply involved in conspiracies against Castro, Watergate burglar, possibly—by his own macabre deathbed confession—a participant in the `project’ to murder JFK, and successful writer of thriller novels, is one of those and I’ll be discussing his odd life a little in the sequel to this essay on the deep state; that second essay will deal with the shallow state, as one commentator has labeled the cultural counterpart to the deep state, one might say the brainwashing operations of an exploitive and at least partially underground power-elite.)
We modern Americans have denied that we have a power-elite or ruling class of any sort and this has made it impossible to keep that power-elite under control. This is of great importance in our time. Criminal conspiracies have often been an important tool for those who exercise power to their own interests. Political enemies, in one’s own country or in other countries, can be murdered if they refuse to do as you wish. Careers of honest men can be destroyed in various ways. Men or women who’ve made one or many mistakes in the past can be blackmailed into doing the wishes of one or more gangs inside what I’ll call the `power-elite’, the ruling class.
Criminal conspiracies need be no more exotic than the mafia involvement in labor unions and in certain industries that allowed the laundering of criminal profits—restaurants and trash-collecting were said to have been popular in past decades. The mafia was also said to have been involved with certain political powers, as seems to have been true in the case of Jimmy Hoffa. There are also Japanese gangsters said to control some labor markets and some industries; there are some journalists claiming Japanese gangsters are deeply involved in what seems to be a very corrupt Japanese nuclear-power industry which also seems incompetent in a very non-Japanese way. Crimes are crimes and criminals are criminals and power-elites of even the most publicly respectable sorts have engaged in professional murder and drug-smuggling and human trafficking. We know this is true in other countries and in other centuries; why would we think that the power-elites have suddenly developed consciences limiting what they will do in the interests of their individual selves, of their families, of their close associates, and occasionally of the entire class of the power-elite? Besides the Mafia in Sicily and mainland Italy and the US and the Japanese gangs, we can also think of the now-weakened Colombian drug-cartels, the now-strengthened Mexican drug-cartels, the Turkish organized crime syndicates which are very much in the loop in politics and business in that country, the Russian mafia—especially those driven out of Russia by Putin and said to be very close to the Israeli political class. China, India. Wherever there is wealth or power to be grabbed or large numbers of human beings to be exploited, there will be gangsters, perhaps young men just controlling the drug-dealers and prostitutes on individual blocks in an inner-city and perhaps even young men engaging in profitable crime to finance a future revolution. Perhaps young men setting up guns-smuggling operations for the sheer excitement of it all.
I’ll anticipate a later part of this essay by saying that the drug-smuggling by the CIA was motivated initially by the perceived need to fight communist insurgents around the world even if the money (maybe for the CIA operatives but certainly for their regional allies) were to come from illegal drugs. The divertable cash-flows from drug-smuggling, arms-smuggling, currency-smuggling, and perhaps professional murder operations, are immense for most purposes.
There is another complication to the issue of power-elites, one which was initially peculiar to the United States at its founding. John Adams saw that the United States was structured to assume that each generation of men was starting out fresh and as a mass of equals and knew this couldn’t work—he claimed in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson that wealthy and powerful men would find ways to get around the various restrictions and attitudes so that they could pass on the wealth and power to their sons. In the opinion of Adams, we needed some sort of public recognition, and imposed code of public honor, to bind men of wealth and power and the sons who would inherit that great wealth. He was right and, in my opinion, the general situation in the United States has encouraged the development of an underground serving the power-elite and, at least in the 1800s through the Cold War, largely run by adventurous sons from the power-elite families, with some families serving the greater families and some families entering the ranks of the power-elite. (And, as Smedley Butler told us, the US Marines were openly used as a sort of labor negotiating team by Wall St investors in Latin America.) In fact, some of the wealthy and powerful families have been surprisingly unknown by the standards of aristocrats in most societies, certainly in the honor-hungry societies of Europe. In his American Empire series of novels, Gore Vidal, a good historian as well as something of an insider to the power-elite (he seems to have despised most of them), mentions the Paynes and Whitneys as having been perhaps the most powerful of families in the early decades of the 20th century because of intermarriages with a number of power-elite families.
True to the American experience, the class of the power-elite and the sub-class of their servants has been remarkably dynamic with such great families as the Rockefellers and Fords joining the ranks of blue-bloods. More recently, Prescott Bush became a `patriarch’, a founder of a servant family entering the ranks of the power-elite, by marrying a daughter of the wealthy and powerful financial genius George Herbert Walker. Bush, along with his blue-blood friend, Neil Mallon helped to integrate the newly rich families of the Texas oil industry into what was no longer just the `Eastern Establishment’. Mallon was interesting in that he had broken with Northeast blue-blood tradition of going into investment banking, financially oriented law-firms, the clergy of (mostly) the Congregationalist Church or the Episcopal Church, or sometimes academia or the adventurous life which too often led into the slave-trade or opium-smuggling in Asia. He entered the corporate life, eventually becoming President of Dresser Industries, an oil industry manufacturing and service company which became the core of Halliburton. Someone or a group of someones, perhaps led by Prescott Bush, brought the newly rich oilmen and water barons of California into the class of the power-elite. A reliable history of these events hasn’t really been written and the crude summary I just gave is very tentative but quite plausible—something of the sort happened. In any case, I’m not interested in the details nor in accuracy at the level of academic historians—I’m interested in the patterns which tell us about the evolution and development of human communities and especially in regards to that ultimate human community: the Body of Christ. I’m also interested personally and on behalf of those I care about because I think something went wrong and the US, indeed the West as a whole, is being destroyed in ways that aren’t even to the advantage of the main power-elite families. They’ve lost control and all the brutal forces they thought to control have been unleashed in the form of stupid wars and the use of despicable forms of torture and, generally, crimes being committed seemingly for the sake of the immediate profit and not for some focused goal, whether that goal is seemingly good or evil. Politicians drive their countries into bankruptcy and bankers steal money which will be worthless before long.
Perhaps the best business in a decade or two will be guillotine manufacturing.
We in the modern world have an irrational idea, usually implicit, that family ties are no longer important but when we need some cuddling after a failed romance; we think to inhabit a world structured according to the ideal rationality of modern, Techno-Enlightenment theories, some of which—particularly in politics—are descended from truly ancient ideas. In fact, this ideal rationality, even when heavily moderated by a recognition of empirical knowledge as was the case when the Fathers founded the United States, is opposed to reality and cannot, in the end, be reconciled with the reality of human nature or of the reality of our context as described by historians and physical scientists and novelists.
In Can a Modern Individualist Understand Who Owns America?, I wrote about the modern (usually implicit) denial that blood-ties are strong to the point of often being the dominant human relationship in political and economical and even ecclesiastical realms. (Sometimes, the relationships are proxy relationships formed to consciously or unconsciously mimic the formation of ties between siblings by, perhaps, sending children to resident schools with children from other families of the right sort.) We falsely see politics and economics in terms of organizations which individuals voluntarily join, perhaps only as a result of invitation. In fact, human nature hasn’t changed so much from those dark centuries when de Medicis used the Papacy or any other tools (including murder or criminal warfare) to gain or protect family wealth and power. When wealthy, powerful men are fighting for “what belongs to them and their children” (especially the oldest son but sometimes nephews, as was true of some popes observant of their vowed celibacy), they don’t just fight within the law or within the range of crimes acceptable to squeamish middle-class Americans. Kings have murdered powerful enemies and stolen all their property, perhaps killing all the close relatives of the original victims to cement the transfer of wealth. Popes have done much the same, though perhaps not nearly so often as some might imagine. Republics and monarchies and oligarchies alike have waged bloody, criminal wars to steal the wealth of another people or to enslave them but usually all participated in the sins and crimes while the few collected the profits. Part of Queen Victoria’s royal income came from the opium-smuggling profits of the East India Company of which she was the largest stockholder.
Brotherhoods of various sorts, shared financial interests, shared religious beliefs, and all the other human ties can provide the glue for secretive human societies, but blood-ties or class-ties of blood and marital and brotherhood relationships almost certainly will remain the most central and usually the strongest human ties in secretive human societies and other human communities. Strong blood-ties make it easier to maintain power and wealth over the generations, even to the point of most family members not using inheritance laws to break non-legal primogeniture and entailment arrangements. The many offer up their children to secure power and wealth for the children of the few, though there are periods, such the years 1800-1970 or so in the United States, when there are substantial benefits for even the least in a region or multiple regions. That is, in fact, how good societies are built—by customs and habits which allow much to the wealthy and powerful but protect the common folk.
I’m not so pessimistic as many of my writings might indicate, including this essay. I don’t think history to be merely a record of crimes and of exploitation of the poor and the powerless, but crimes and exploitation are with us always in this mortal realm and might even become dominant factors in the best of communities if the common men don’t keep watch and aren’t prepared to stand up for the rights of their children and grandchildren.
Crimes we’ve had even in the best days of the American Republic, though our public-school textbooks tell fairy-tales of a morally well-ordered, freedom loving American citizenry. As a side-comment: I can’t understand how Americans can claim to be Christians who consider the Bible to be a source of truth and then accept the view of the United States as being a better country than the Bible would indicate to be possible, the American people to be a morally superior people to any in the Bible or foretold by the prophets or Jesus Christ Himself.
Admittedly, there is a strain of American thought, very strong right now in our public schools and all colleges, which brutally depicts the crimes (and sins by at least implications) of the Southern slaveholders, but it’s pretty well established that the North tried slavery and it didn’t work up north except for household slaves and in some small-scale crafts shops. Moreover, as I have noted a few times in past writings, New Englanders from the Colonial period were selling native Americans as slaves throughout the world; Americans including some from prestigious families were smuggling opium into China in the late 1700s and the first half or so of the 1800s and a good number were working the slave trade on the West Coast of Africa throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The latter fact is one of the reasons Lincoln didn’t want to punish the South unduly after the War Between the States. So far as I can tell, this blue-blood (and more generally, Northeastern American) entry into profitable lives of crime and sin was first motivated by a desire for adventure on the part of those not equipped, emotionally or mentally or physically (restlessness), for the mundane life as a farmer or storekeeper or even that of investment banker or Wall St lawyer. But, whatever the original motivation, the profits flowed back to a prosperous region largely lacking in the sort of liquid wealth needed to fuel the sort of development that the Northeast and the Midwest would see from about 1800 into the 1900s.
Some of the mansions in Boston and New Haven and New York and Philadelphia were built with profits from the slave-trade or the Asian drug-trade. In fact, John Jacob Astor bought a strip of land heading north from the physically small village of Manhattan and developed that strip into Fifth Avenue; Astor’s money to that point had come partly from legal trading with the Indians of upper New York state and partly from selling them whiskey and guns even while they were at war with the white settlers and then those profits were increased greatly in the opium smuggling business in Asia. Criminal profits flowed also into the investment pools used to build railroads and mines and manufacturing corporations throughout the United States, though the power-elite families predominately deployed and controlled their wealth and power through investment banking and Wall St law-firms. We can exaggerate the meaning of all of this if we think that all blue-blood families or other families of distinction owned seats on a major stock exchange or held a partnership in a major Wall St or Boston law-firm, if we think all the wealth of the Eastern Establishment came from criminal activities or high-powered investment or legal careers; there were many who had quite ordinary occupations or were distinguished authors or scholars or missionaries, though David Halberstram taught us in The Best and the Brightest that some of those blue-bloods with moral integrity did as much damage to the United States as any of their criminal cousins. My point is that these criminal activities, however marginal at times and however important at other times, show a Mafia-like loyalty to one’s own family and gang/class that turns outsiders into some sort of class of subhumans to be exploited. That was also true, in Halberstram’s book, of those crews of privileged Harvard professors become advisors to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and who brought us the wonders of Vietnam and nearly those of nuclear war.
I’ll soon be noting the work of a respected and honored historian who paints the situation in very dark terms—the power-elite of the United States operates at times in ways not all different from those of a Latin American drug-cartel, at least in the way of a drug-cartel being able to draw upon the resources of Wall St and the American government. First, I’ll turn to a man who speaks harsh truths, but has a view a bit different from and perhaps more `moderate’ than mine. Back in February, Bill Moyers published an article, Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State, which was written by Mike Lofgren, “a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees,” an insider of at least the American political system.
What is the `deep state’? Lofgren provides a definition in a footnote which I’ll quote in its entirety:
The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as “…the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
Lofgren’s view is sufficient to puncture illusions of the average American who believes he can go about his roles as a fan of the Chargers and the Rolling Stones and also as a town and church volunteer while trusting those slightly crooked but most all-right politicians to govern the country in the best interests of all, though no one could possibly define `all’ and most especially not in the demographically dynamic and culturally chaotic United States. We are a country and a people made for moral disorder, and this is undoubtedly one of the factors contributing to the development of a criminal underground which operates as part of the power-elite and isn’t just a marginal bunch of gravely-voiced Sicilians and flamboyantly dressed African-Americans from the inner-city. In fact, as I’ll note later, there is good reason to believe that even those street criminals don’t have to launder money through the cash-registers of restaurants nowadays—they have their own special contacts at the best, or at least largest, of American banks.
In any case, I would suspect the Turkish definition to be more accurate in all modern states—organized crime in the sense of arms-smugglers, drug-smugglers, and professional murderers are embedded in the modern state and are sometimes receiving paychecks from the CIA or US AID or the private foundations and `charities’ which consciously or unconsciously work to destroy foreign cultures or political entities to some presumed (and usually imaginary) benefit of the American government. Moreover, my admittedly sparse knowledge of such matters as drug-smuggling and arms-trafficking lead me to doubt if Boeing and other major arms-merchants could possibly be free from the taint of not only arms-smuggling but also drug-smuggling and currency-smuggling. Similar comments could be made about a multitude of financial services companies and manufacturers even outside of the weapons industry. We live in a truly corrupt age, though some are inclined to see clearly only when sexual crimes or street crimes are involved.
One reason for considering the possibility that true gangsters are integral parts of the deep state, in its political and economic realms, is the reported dependence of the American economy on the liquidity supplied through the bank deposits of Mexican drug-cartels (said by some to have saved the US from a far worse collapse in 2008). In fact, Lofgren notes the importance of cash-flows to the deep state: “If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past.” Lofgren is speaking mostly of cash-flows from Wall St but even that is sometimes quite tainted beyond even their possession of vast amounts of free money from the Federal Reserve Bank and other government handouts paid for by the American taxpayer.
In an article, Global banks are the financial services wing of the drug cartels, which must be rather depressing to those holding `mainstream’ views about the modern world, we can read about the involvement of the British bank HSBC and the American bank Wachovia (now part of Wells-Fargo) in laundering money for drug-cartels. The HSBC executives lined up to apologize to the US Senate for crimes far worse than those which put street dealers in prison for years, even decades. “Wachovia was fined $50m and made to surrender $110m in proven drug profits, but was shown to have inadequately monitored a staggering $376bn through the casa de cambio [`a currency exchange house operated in Mexico on behalf of the largest criminal syndicate in the world and one of the most savage’] over four years, of which $10bn was in cash.” We also learn: “No one from Wachovia went to jail.” The same was true of HSBC.
I’ll just list three more stories on the subject and let the reader follow up:
- Money Laundering and The Drug Trade: The Role of the Banks,
- Wells Fargo: Your Neighborhood Mega-Money Laundering, Drug War Profiteering, Prison-Industry Enlarging Bank, and
- How A Major U.S. Bank Laundered Billions In Mexican Drug Money.
There are lots of strange, individual stories originally mostly from mainstream journalists about the various crimes related to the Iran-Contra conspiracy, ties between the CIA, Oliver North, the Saudi Arabian royal family, the Bin Laden family, Bill Clinton, the Bushes, and various smugglers and professional murderers. One bank involved in financing the Iran-Contra smuggling, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “handled money for Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Hussain Mohammad Ershad and Samuel Doe. Other account holders included Medellin Cartel and Abu Nidal.” “The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency held numerous accounts at BCCI, according to William von Raab, former U.S. Commissioner of Customs. Oliver North also used and held multiple accounts at BCCI. These bank accounts were used for a variety of illegal covert operations, including transfers of money and weapons related to the Iran-Contra scandal, according to Time Magazine. The CIA also worked with BCCI in arming and financing the Afghan mujahideen during the Afghan War against the Soviet Union, using BCCI to launder proceeds from trafficking heroin grown in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, boosting the flow of narcotics to European and U.S. markets.” Even the venerable Clark Clifford was indicted for involvement with BCCI. [See the original Wikipedia article about BCCI for the footnotes referencing original sources.]
The US Customs was allowed to infiltrate BCCI and take it down after the Soviet Union fell and this gangster bank was no longer needed for fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Even if casual research is done and even if you only accept what is said in original sources from the mainstream press, you will soon see that drug-cartels come and go (and might disappear in Columbia to grow anew in Mexico) as do arms-smugglers and other gangsters as most think of the term but the corrupt Western banks and the Western national security agencies, especially the CIA, have been constant presences in these large-scale, international criminal enterprises since at least the beginning of the Cold War.
There is an academic who can tell us how this came to be: Alfred W McCoy, the JRW Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin and a specialist in Southeast Asia. The first paragraph of his bio sketch reads:
After earning a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale, my writing on this region has focused on two topics—Philippine political history and global opium trafficking. My first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic.
Imagine that. A book about, though not only about, CIA heroin manufacturing and smuggling is “regarded as the `classic’ work on the global drug traffic.” Perhaps Lofgren should become a bit more skeptical about the power-elites of the modern world, including the ones in the United States? (We should be careful about using `power-elite’ in the singular unless we specifically recognize that it is a class made up of different groups often doing battle against each other, united only when their `right’ to exploit the naive and the weak is endangered. Otherwise it is best to use plural forms, recognizing the conflicts inside the class of `power-elite’, for example the conflict some, including me, see between the powerful, established families and some of the servants grown powerful—especially those in the national-security industries or the oil or weapons industries.)
The last paragraph of Professor McCoy’s bio sketch reads:
My current work explores the role of the “covert netherworld”—an invisible social interstice inhabited by criminal syndicates and secret services—in shaping the politics of modern states and their world order. My first publication from this project, exploring the domestic dimension of this covert realm, is titled Beer of Broadway Fame: The Piel Family, Their Brewery, and a Changing America, and will be published in 2015.
We live in a world different from and not so much different from the morally corrupt political and ecclesiastical world of the Renaissance, in Italy and a few other regions of Europe. We live in a world with a “covert netherworld”, with “an invisible social interstice inhabited by criminal syndicates and secret services.” Those who inhabit or travel through this interstice shape “the politics of modern states and their world order.”
Nasty stuff and often American nasty stuff—though there is a common sewer underlying the modern world which includes regions perhaps even nastier than the American sewers.
Was it horrible what happened to American cities beginning in the 1950s, when heroin and other illegal drugs piled on top of other factors leading to social and moral decay? Yes, but the timing and other facts point to the likelihood that much of that heroin came from operations originally started by the CIA and perhaps turned over to their allies such as two divisions of the Nationalist Chinese Army driven into Burma and turning to drug-manufacturing and drug-smuggling to finance an ongoing war against communism. Why would good American boys, likely even noble to the point of having been varsity football or baseball players, have started heroin production and smuggling operations? McCoy was told by a highly regarded OSS (predecessor of the CIA) officer that, during the years after WWII, the US Congress wanted the newly-formed CIA to engage in an extensive covert worldwide war against communism but wasn’t willing to pay the full costs. The CIA started a variety of businesses, some largely legitimate, to finance some of their operations or to help their allies finance their operations.
Lofgren seems to hold a softer view than I hold. He claims in Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State:
My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.
I certainly know the American deep state isn’t omniscient or invincible. In fact, in recent decades it seems to have screwed up and destroyed American wealth and power more than it has added to American wealth and power. The question I raise is: how integral is that sewer (the “highly sinister aspects” as Lofgren has it) to the overall operations of the American state, underground and above ground? That is a question that can be answered only by an analysis of the structure of the power-elite class I’m certainly not qualified to make, and I’ll never be so qualified because my ultimate interests are in a more general understanding of human being allowing for both the revealed truths of Christianity and modern empirical knowledge. This business about power-elites and deep states is just a small part of that empirical knowledge.
There’s a spectrum of possibilities and I think Lofgren isn’t so far from where I sit, and McCoy and others, that is, not so far as I thought when I first read this article. I think the criminal underground of the American deep state is really integral to the entire system and it can’t be cleaned up at this point without taking down many American institutions and bringing chaos into our political and economic systems. (For those who prefer audio, see CIA complicity in the global drug trade for a discussion between McCoy and Peter Dale Scott who speaks of some interesting connections between CIA drug operations and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. I don’t recall he drew a strong conclusion, but it seems a possible case of the tail, CIA drug operations, wagging the dog of American war. The US Marines were once used to shoot Latin American peasants demanding better pay, why would it not be possible the entire US military was used to protect drug-cartels?)
Lofgren is right that it’s not a cabal; there is no wizard behind the screen but rather gangsters battling it out in the sewers and emerging to murder and smuggle drugs or weapons, for their own needs or those of the above ground bankers and politicians and corporate bosses who have some control over some of the criminals. There may even be, or have been, some who lived in both worlds, underground and above ground.
The important concept is that of power-elite, a class intertwined not only with powerful investment operations, Wall St law-firms, the political parties, corporations and especially in the arms-manufacturing and oil industries, and money-center banks, but also intertwined with criminal organizations which serve the powerful and wealthy and with criminal organizations which are independent profit-centers. Any cabals are parts of smaller and tighter entities inside the deep state, or the class of power-elite, sometimes really families or extended families and sometimes temporary groups such as those which came together to try to overthrow Castro. I’ve dealt with these issues over the past four years or so in a variety of articles: What is a Conspiracy?, Are Conspiracies Self-organizing?, I Have a Problem with Many Conspiracy Theorists, Are Serious Historians Conspiracy Nuts?, Conspiracies Confirmed!?, Who Are the American Elites and Are They Conspirators?, and Conspiratorial Gangsters Are the Leaders Americans Want and Deserve.
My general view on conspiracies and deep states and the like is that they are very similar to the good forms of organizations which Adam Smith saw developing by way of the useful myth of the Invisible Hand. Behind the myth is the cooperative nature of a social animal of great complexity. It’s of greater interest (at least to me) and of greater importance to deal with the underlying human being which can lead to various sorts of human communities organized by conscious and unconscious means; some of those communities might be good and some evil and many of mixed character. Human beings of some substantial moral order, such as the Christians of Scotland and England in the second half of the 18th century, will work by those conscious and unconscious means to build communities of moral order. Human beings of defective moral order, such as the barbarian children of the United States, will work by those conscious and unconscious means to build communities of moral disorder or, at best, a defective moral order working to the benefit of the few.
You can read about some of my work to date at understanding human being in a more exact way and from a fundamental level to the level of complex communities in Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, and A Christian Sociobiology. I’ve also written a book giving an overview of my still developing ideas: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.